A sales agent for part manufacturers: VMSA

The sales activity of most parts manufacturing companies is based on orders of buyers. The process of promotion, receipt and selection of orders of the parts manufacturers is closely coupled with the load status of the production lines. On deciding whether to accept an order or not, as well as negotiating with buyers, sales persons need information such as load and schedule of production lines, and manufacturability of the order. Manufacturability analysis, process planning, and scheduling are therefore key features in developing an agent of sales activity for the parts manufacturing business. In this paper, an intelligent agent, a virtual manufacturing-based sales agent (VMSA) with multi-agent architecture is proposed to support the sales activity for the parts manufacturers in the Internet environment. A VMSA has an integrated architecture of agent and virtual manufacturing. The prototype of VMSA has been developed for a machine parts manufacturing company that has lathe machines, drilling machines, cutting machines, and milling machines.     

Efficient Algorithms for Image Template and Dictionary Matching

Given a large text image and a small template image, the Template Matching Problem is that of finding every location within the text which looks like the pattern. This problem, which has received attention for low-level image processing, has been formalized by defining a distance metric between arrays of pixels and finding all subarrays of the large image which are within some threshold distance of the template. These so-called metric methods tends to be too slow for many applications, since evaluating the distance function can take too much time. We present a method for quickly eliminating most positions of the text from consideration as possible matches. The remaining candidate positions are then evaluated one by one against the template for a match. We are still guaranteed to find all matching positions, and our method gives significant speed-ups. Finally, we consider the problem of matching a dictionary of templates against a text. We present methods which are much faster than matching the templates individually against the input image.     

基于G2的实时生产调度系统研究

该文以实时专家系统工具G2作为生产调度的平台 ,通过对G2中的知识表达、知识库管理以及实时推理等关键问题的探讨 ,以某钢厂炼钢车间调度为例 ,建立调度的复合知识模型 ,最终开发一个调度的原型系统 ,并给出仿真结果     

A 2‐in. a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD with embedded backlight control TFT sensors with various channel widths

Abstract— A 2.0‐in. a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD with embedded TFT sensors for the control of the backlight intensity according to the ambient light intensity has been developed. Two types of a‐Si:H TFT sensors with various channel widths were embedded into a TFT backplane with bottom‐ and top‐gate structures for measuring the ambient light and backlight illumination, respectively. The output signal, measured by a readout IC, increased with backlight intensity until 20,000 lux.     

Maximum Likelihood Sound Source Localization and Beamforming for Directional Microphone Arrays in Distributed Meetings

In distributed meeting applications, microphone arrays have been widely used to capture superior speech sound and perform speaker localization through sound source localization (SSL) and beamforming. This paper presents a unified maximum likelihood framework of these two techniques, and demonstrates how such a framework can be adapted to create efficient SSL and beamforming algorithms for reverberant rooms and unknown directional patterns of microphones. The proposed method is closely related to steered response power-based algorithms, which are known to work extremely well in real-world environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on challenging synthetic and real-world datasets, including over six hours of recorded meetings.     

NearFar: A computer program for nearside-farside decomposition of heavy-ion elastic scattering amplitude

The NearFar program is a package for carrying out an interactive nearside-farside decomposition of heavy-ion elastic scattering amplitude. The program is implemented in Java to perform numerical operations on the nearside and farside angular distributions. It contains a graphical display interface for the numerical results. A test run has been applied to the elastic scattering at Elab=1503 MeV.

Program summary

Title of program: NearFarCatalogue identifier: ADYP_v1_0Program summary URL:http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/ADYP_v1_0Program obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen's University of Belfast, N. IrelandLicensing provisions: noneComputers: designed for any machine capable of running Java, developed on PC-Pentium-4Operating systems under which the program has been tested: Microsoft Windows XP (Home Edition)Program language used: JavaNumber of bits in a word: 64Memory required to execute with typical data: case dependentNo. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 3484Number of bytes distributed program, including test data, etc.: 142 051Distribution format: tar.gzOther software required: A Java runtime interpreter, or the Java Development Kit, version 5.0Nature of physical problem: Interactive nearside-farside decomposition of heavy-ion elastic scattering amplitude.Method of solution: The user must supply a external data file or PPSM parameters which calculates theoretical values of the quantities to be decomposed.Typical running time: Problem dependent. In a test run, it is about 35 s on a 2.40 GHz Intel P4-processor machine.     

H-BSP: A Hierarchical BSP Computation Model

This paper presents a new parallel computing model, called H-BSP, which adds a hierarchical concept to the BSP(Bulk Synchronous Parallel) computing model. An H-BSP program consists of a number of BSP groups which are dynamically created at run time and executed in a hierarchical fashion. H-BSP allows algorithm designers to develop more efficient algorithms by utilizing processor locality in the program. Based on the distributed memory model, H-BSP provides a group-based programming paradigm and supports Divide & Conquer algorithms efficiently. This paper describes the structure of the H-BSP model, complexity analysis and some examples of H-BSP algorithm. Also presented is the performance characteristics of H-BSP algorithms based on the simulation analysis. Simulation results show that H-BSP takes advantages of processor locality and performs well in low bandwidth networks or in a constant-valence architecture such as 2-dimensional mesh. It is also proved that H-BSP can predict algorithm performance better than BSP, due to its locality-preserving nature.     

Response to ‘Comments on: A cohesion measure for object‐oriented classes’

Indicating that CBMC does not satisfy the monotonic property in terms of the number of interactions, Xu and Zhou proposed an augmented definition of CBMC by adopting cut set instead of glue methods. The augmented CBMC clearly satisfies the monotonic property. However, CBMC is designed to overcome the problem with respect to the number of interactions and, therefore, focuses on the interaction pattern, especially, member connectivity. Consequently, it does not make sense to mention the monotonic property of CBMC with respect to interaction number. Moreover, the notion of glue methods allows several interpretations on the design quality of a class. However, that meaningful interpretation is not possible for the augmented definition due to the removal of the notion of glue methods. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Getting closer and experiencing together: Antecedents and consequences of psychological distance in social media-enhanced real-time streaming video

Social media services such as YouTube and Flickr have become online necessities for millions of users worldwide. Social media are online services that enable users to share contents, opinions, and perspectives that support communication with other users. Social media places an emphasis on the shared experience between users, which we call co-experience. However, the online characteristics of social media increase psychological distance between users, which, in turn, results in a decrease in the quality of co-experience. Hence, as the goal of this study, we theoretically modeled and empirically verified the antecedents and user experience-based consequences of psychological distance in a social media-enhanced real-time streaming video service. In order to reduce psychological distance, we introduced two system elements: inhabited space (the degree of being situated in context and in a meaningful place) and isomorph effects (the degree of preserving the structure of a user’s actions). We constructed a social media-enhanced real-time streaming video service prototype and conducted a field experiment with actual social media users. The prototype, which streamed a live baseball game, enabled users to simultaneously view the game from remote locations and to interact with each other through cheering tools. The results indicate that inhabited space and isomorph effects reduce psychological distance between users, and this, in turn, enhances co-experience. This paper ends with theoretical as well as practical implications of the study.     

Automatic Real-Time Video Matting Using Time-of-Flight Camera and Multichannel Poisson Equations

This paper presents an automatic real-time video matting system. The proposed system consists of two novel components. In order to automatically generate trimaps for live videos, we advocate a Time-of-Flight (TOF) camera-based approach to video bilayer segmentation. Our algorithm combines color and depth cues in a probabilistic fusion framework. The scene depth information returned by the TOF camera is less sensitive to environment changes, which makes our method robust to illumination variation, dynamic background and camera motion. For the second step, we perform alpha matting based on the segmentation result. Our matting algorithm uses a set of novel Poisson equations that are derived for handling multichannel color vectors, as well as the depth information captured. Real-time processing speed is achieved through optimizing the algorithm for parallel processing on graphics hardware. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our matting system on an extensive set of experimental results.